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A TRIBUTE 



TO 



LEVI STOCKBRIDGE, 

Professor of Agriculture in the Massachusetts Agricultural 

College from 187 i to 1882, and President of 

THE College from 1880 to 1882. 



By WILLIAM H: BOWKER 

of the class of '71. 



Read at the Memorial Exercises at Commencement, 
Amherst, June 15, 1904. 




Lkvi Stockhriix^.e. 



A TRIBUTE 



TO 



LEVI STOCRBRIDGE, 



WILLIAM H. BOWKER, of the Class of '7f. 



Read at tKe Memorial Cxercises at Commencement, Am- 
Kerst, June 15, 1904. 



Professor Stockbridge was very near, very dear, and very neces- 
sary to " his boys ; " and he counted us all as " his boys," whether 
we had just entered the C9llege or had grown weary and gray in 
life's battle. He was a father to many and a counsellor to all. We 
cannot think of him in an impersonal way, but always in the rela- 
tionship of friend and comrade — one to whom we could take our 
troubles — one who would meet us on our own plane, whether we 
came from the farm or from the city. He had been a farmer's boy 
himself — he knew the boy's environment, his habits of thought and 
his ambitions, and therefore could meet him on a common ground ; 
yet he was equally interested and successful in dealing with the city- 
bred boy. He loved young manhood from every station of life. To 
him all boys possessed great possibilities, and he felt it incumbent 
upon him to find these out and direct them into proper channels. 

He came of the purest New England stock, of a large and devout 
family, whose parents, like so many others, were ambitious for their 
children, but not able to give each one a college education. In the 
Stockbridge family it fell to the lot of the oldest brother to enter 
Amherst college. Levi, no doubt, felt that it was unfortunate, if not 



wrong, that he should not have an equal chance, but very likely he 
never expressed regret or displeasure to his parents. He was one 
who never complained, and accepted his lot with the duty it entailed. 
He did not, however, let the inability of his parents to send him to 
college daunt his courage or dampen his ambition, for when his 
brother was taking his course in the old college, Levi was studying 
the same books at home, and attending many of the lectures, par- 
ticularly in chemistry, that his brother studied at Amherst. Thus, 
while he had little personal contact with the teacher and the profes- 
sor — so important an influence in moulding young life — he was 
pursuing, as far as he could, many of the studies which so admirably 
fitted him for his life work. Very likely at that time he had no 
thought of becoming a teacher, much less a moulder of character in 
an institution new in the field of education. Rather, he was fitting 
himself to be a good citizen and a good farmer. He saw, as but few 
others did at that time, the wide field and the great need of the edu- 
cated farmer. He had read the works of Liebig, the founder of 
agricultural chemistry. The experiments of Lawes and Gilbert, in a 
field which he afterwards occupied and broadened, were not unknown 
to him. He was familiar with the teachings of Jethro Trull, and I 
am sure, with his enthusiastic nature, he must have enjoyed the 
writings of Charles Downing, that poet of the orchard and philoso- 
pher of the garden. As a young man, he kept in touch with the 
proceedings which led up to the founding of the Board of Agricul- 
ture, and finally of this College. He knew and respected the work 
of Marshall P. Wilder, the philanthropic merchant, and Simon 
Brown, the talented agricultural editor. Just who was his prototype 
I do not know, but he must have been of a high order. Perhaps he 
has left somewhere a record of the man who exercised the greatest 
influence over him. There is rarely a man who cannot point to 
some one who, earlier or later in life, has helped to shape his course, 
either for good or for evil. We older men, in our contact with young 
men, sometimes forget our unconscious influence over them, but the 
teacher and the professor in a college should never do so. Profes- 
sor Stockbridge always remembered his relationship to the student 
body, and yet he was never stilted or unapproachable. Underneath 
his quaint, humorous speech and sometimes droll ways, there was a 
dignity and firmness of manner which the boys felt and respected. 



No teacher in my day preserved better order in the class room, and 
no one was more successful with his classes. 

We have heard to-day, or shall hear, of his work in connection 
with the establishment and upbuilding of this College, and of his 
scientific and practical work in the field of agriculture, but after all, 
I feel, as you all must feel, that his most beneficent influence, his 
greatest achievement, was his personal, close relationship to the stu- 
dent body of this institution ; for while he was a natural instructor, 
clear, brilliant and enthusiastic, yet he was greatest and best as friend 
and adviser. The College was extremely fortunate in having at the 
start such a man — ^healthful, helpful, courageous, buoyant and opti- 
mistic, but always possessed of good judgment. He was sunny, 
hopeful, sane. In all my thirty-seven years* acquaintance with him 
I never saw him cast down. 

Many of us found him a helpful friend in a substantial way. I do 
not know how many young men owe the completion of their college 
course to his financial aid. I fear many would not have gone through 
this institution if he had not helped them. We can all see him now, 
at least some of us can, when we were strapped — and what young 
man does not get in that fix now and then ? — we can see him, after 
he had asked us a few leading questions, put in such a way as never 
to disclose his feelings but always ours — he was as keen as the keen- 
est lawyer — we can see him pull out his old leather wallet from a 
pair of ungainly-fitting trousers, leisurely unstrap it, and hand out a 
five or a ten dollar bill without further comment. How relieved we 
were ! How the clouds lifted, and how life took on a new hope for 
us ! I sometimes think he took a secret delight in our temporary 
discomfiture, and in our manifest pleasure when the ordeal was over, 
for the twinkle of his eye and the smile of his lip were very expres- 
sive and will ever be remembered by his numerous boys. I wonder 
if he always kept account of the aid which he gave. I hope and be- 
lieve that the boys did, and returned it with interest ; but whether 
that was the case or not, he enjoyed helping them, for he had been 
there himself. Moreover, he had been taught that it was good to 
cast his bread upon the waters, knowing that it would come back to 
some one, if not to him, in God's own way and time. He wanted no 
young man to fail of going through his beloved institution for lack 
of funds ; and yet he believed in every man helping himself. If he 
had been a millionaire he would not have been lavish in his aid — he 



would have assisted only those who assisted themselves. He was a 
keen reader of character. He sifted the wheat from the chaff, and 
no doubt many a boy stayed in college and many a boy went away 
because of the advice- which he gave him, in that kindly way which 
never offended. Probably there was not in this institution during 
his day a student who did not at some time consult him. Thus he 
helped to mould as best he knew — and for the best, as I believe — the 
life of every man who came under his influence. 

What a work he undertook ! It must be borne in mind that when 
he came from the Hadley farm to take charge of the College farm 
and to superintend the erection of the first buildings, it was practi- 
cally the first agricultural college to be started in this country. The 
field was absolutely new ; there was not a model to go by. The 
buildings were to be built and arranged not only for academic but for 
practical training. Again, when he undertook instruction in agricul- 
ture there was not another chair of agriculture in the country, and 
there was no one to whom he could turn for advice. He had to blaze 
the way, without books and without chart. And how well he did it ! 
His lectures were to me the most interesting of any I attended. They 
were clear, concise and always practical. They could not be other- 
wise, for he possessed a clear, logical mind and a terse form of 
speech. His English was exceptionally good. 

He had an original and inventive mind. He saw, as others did 
not see, the necessity of taking what chemists, botanists, geologists 
and other scientists had worked out, and of applying it to practical 
ends ; stripping it, as far as possible, of all technicality, and making 
it plain and simple, not only to the farmer's boy here in the College 
but to the father at home. He popularized and made assimi- 
lable the teachings of all the sciences related to agriculture, but he 
lectured to a larger audience than the students of the College — he 
spoke to the farmers of the land. 

It is claimed that agriculture is not a science, but an art — that 
there is no need of a chair of agriculture in any college ; and I 
sometimes think that it is true, for agriculture is made up of so many 
collateral branches. Stockbridge realized this, and by his great in- 
sight and practical training was able to glean from all sources of 
knowledge that which was essential to the upbuilding of agriculture. 
As he taught and exemplified agriculture in his day, he demonstrated 
the value of the chair of agriculture in all our agricultural colleges. 



He ploughed and sowed for all of them, and all of them are reaping 
the fruits of his labor. 

May I be somewhat personal, for I take it that personal reminis- 
cences will be interesting at this time ? I came here a green lad 
from a small farm in northern Worcester county, and I shall not for- 
get my first meeting with Professor Stockbridge. I can see him stand- 
ing on what is now the campus, superintending some of the finishing 
touches to the buildings, on which the paint was not dry — a tall, 
spare man, dressed in a rough suit of clothes and a slouch hat, with 
sandy hair and beard slightly streaked with grey, with keen, kindly 
eyes looking out from beneath shaggy eyebrows — -a striking charac- 
ter in the full vigor of manhood. He was thirty-seven years old 
when he began the work of his life, and eighty-four when he died. 
As you may imagine, he was far from iny picture of a college profes- 
sor, who should have been dressed in black clothes, with gray beard 
and gold-bowed spectacles, and^ whom I expected to stand in awe. 
We were all standing at that time in a fifty-acre field surrounded 
with Virginia fences and filled in here and there with corn fields and 
apple trees and tumble-down tobacco sheds. An incongruous pic- 
ture it made, with the modern buildings towering above it all. 
But the impression which he made\4apon me was that he was one of 
our kind — an approachable man, who could drive a yoke of oxen or 
preside at a town meeting with equal ease. Boys get curious im- 
pressions, but I know it went through my mind that if I got home- 
sick — which I did — I could go to him and talk it over — which I did 
not do, however, because it is a boy's way to bluff it through. 

The next recollection I have of him is in the management Of a class 
of sixty unruly chaps from farm, city and village, in our first lesson in 
husking out a field of corn. It was a bright October afternoon, and 
although I was brought up amid beautiful scenery I shall never for- 
get this picture and its superb setting. It had its healthful influence 
on us, as it must have had on those who have followed us. Neither 
shall I forget his masterful and tactful way of handling us ; and just 
here let me say that I think his tact and judgment were, after all, 
his greatest gifts, which he had occasion many times afterwards to 
bring successfully into play in his management of the student body 
in manual training, then a new departure in college education. We 
must have been a sore problem to him, for it should be remembered 
that we were the pioneer class — the experimental class — and he and 



we were green together. The harvesting of this corn crop was a 
splendid object lesson to us in the management of men and teams 
and in the selection of seed, but I think it also opened his eyes to 
some things. 

I next remember him taking a class into the hay tield to learn how 
to make hay, to run a mowing machine and to use the scythe in 
trimming out. Some of us knew how to do it, for we had come from 
the hay field, but there were some from the city who had never seen 
a scythe — at least, had never swung one. When Herrick, a beam- 
ing boy from the city of Lawrence, looking through big, round, rim- 
less glasses, started in with his scythe, everybody else fled for fear of 
accident. Stockbridge said, *' Keep your heel down, Herrick ! " and 
Herrick, not knowing what he meant, plunged away, stamping his 
heel into the wet soil and running the point of his scythe into the 
ground, the rest of us laughing at him. Finally, "Old Prof," with 
infinite patience, stepped up to him and said, " Young man, it is not 
the heel of your boot, but the shank or the heel of the scythe which 
you must keep to the ground if you would cut a swath in this life." 
Young Herrick was cut off by the great reaper too early to demon- 
strate the teachings of Stockbridge. 

The next time I remember him as 'standing out prominently, to us 
at least, was in the fall of '68, when Grant was first elected to the 
presidency of the L[nited States. When the news of the election 
came to town, a glorification meeting was held to celebrate the vic- 
tory. All the students of both colleges, of whatever political faith, 
joined in a procession and marched around to the professors' houses, 
both of the old and the new college, calling each man out for a 
speech. We began down town, and were first addressed by Presi- 
dent Stearns, Professors Seelye, Tyler and I think by dear old Pro- 
fessor Snell. one of the sunniest men I ever met ; then up to Presi- 
dent Clark's house, where he gave us a rousing reception and a good 
speech. Finally, we lined up in front of " Prof. Stock's " house. 
Stockbridge expected us, and evidently had been preparing some- 
thing for us. I can see him now, coming down the rickety stairs of 
his little old woodshed office and deliberately walking up to the door- 
step in front of the house. I cannot recall his language, but I re- 
member his eulogy of Lincoln, and then of Grant, who had been 
Lincoln's mainstay, closing with a splendid outline of the future for 
" us boys," as he called us, who were then coming on the stage, with 



a plea for good citizenship and patriotism, as exemplified by these 
two great Americans. It was voted by the students of both colleges 
to be the best speech of the evening. 

Shall we ever forget him as a writer and public speaker ? He was 
clear, earnest, often brilliant, and always sensible ; but if he hap- 
pened to be pleading for his beloved College or for the cause of 
agriculture, then it was that he rose to the occasion, convincing and 
unanswerable ! 

May I again be personal ? Perhaps no one has had closer busi- 
ness relations with Professor Stockbridge than I during the past 
thirty years. I came to know him intimately in a business way. I 
touched him on the money side, and it is said that if one would 
know a man's true character, one must have financial transactions 
with him. In all my thirty years' association wirh Professor Stock- 
bridge I never found him sharp or underhanded. He always took a 
broad, clear, business-like view of every situation, and was fair and 
Uberal in his dealings. When he placed the Stockbridge formulas in 
in my hands — I was then a young man of twenty- five — I could but feel 
that it was a mark of confidence, for there were large and rich concerns 
in New York that had applied to him for the opportunity to manu- 
facture them under his name. It was a gray, cold December day 
when the trade was closed in his woodshed office. I can see him 
now, with his long legs stretched out, toasting his* shins at the little 
old broken-down stove which would hold only a stick at a time, and 
I remember wondering how he ever got time to write his lectures and 
keep that stove going. When he was about to sign the agreement, 
he remarked : " I know you ; you have been one of my boys and one 
of our College family, and I think I'll take my chances with you." I 
hope he never regretted the step, and I think he did not, for he vol- 
untarily remained a director in our company, in which he tQok a 
great interest, to the day of his death. And let me say, in passing, 
that he always insisted upon our business being done on a high 
plane, and was as jealous of the good report of the company as of 
the formulas which bore his name. He set a high standard and ex- 
pected us to live up to it. 

It will be well to record here that the first money received by 
Professor Stockbridge in royalties for the use of his name (his for- 
mulas were given to the world for anybody to use) was devoted to 
experimental work at Amherst, which practically laid the foundation 



for the first experiment station to be established in this country in 
connection with an agricultural college, and the second station to be 
incorporated in the United States. The first was incorporated by 
Connecticut at New Haven, and the second by Massachusetts at 
Amherst. 

These two stations were afterwards consolidated with the govern- 
ment stations, and along with forty -two others, one in each state, 
were endowed under the Hatch bill, and are now known as the Hatch 
Experiment Stations. But to Johnson and Atwater, of Connecticut, 
among the greatest of living agricultural chemists, and to Stock- 
bridge and Clark, of Massachusetts, the wisest of practical educa- 
tors, belongs the credit of inaugurating this great educational move- 
ment. Out of it, also, has grown the enlarged and vigorous Depart- 
ment of Agriculture at Washington, which in connection with the 
stations and the agricultural colleges is doing yeoman's service for 
the advancement of knowledge. These stations and the agricultural 
colleges, each supplementing the other — the one to develop men and 
the other to develop methods — may well be considered the renais- 
sance of our new agriculture. 

I want to mention another personal recollection. In one of his 
lectures — or talks, as he liked to call them — the question of the large 
personal fortunes that were beginning to pile up was under discus- 
sion. He, as you all know, was very democratic in his feelings, in- 
clined to side with the under dog, whether the dog was right or 
wrong. He regretted the advantage which the crafty and unscrupu- 
lous were taking of the people and of the laws of the people, in 
amassing wealth in la^oful, but, as he thought, i?>ipfvper ways. And 
I remember his flashing out one day with this remark : 

" No man has a right to more than a stated amount of property, a 
million if you please. If he amasses more than the allotted amount 
he should yield up the excess to the state. The prizes should be 
divided more equally and distributed more widely." 

When asked how he would accomplish it, he replied : 

" Through the probate court, through which all estates must pass 
sooner or later, or by some other effective means." 

I suppose he meant that if a man's estate was found by official 
appraisal to be more than the allotted amount he would have the 
excess pass to the government, and thus he w^ould hope to check 



greed and selfish ambition. This remark was made more than thirty 
years ago, and he lived to see, in the inheritance tax, a partial step 
in that direction. He probably felt then, as many have come to feel 
since, that the game should be played more fairly, and, if necessary, 
that the rules of the game should be modified ; that the prizes, as in 
schools and universities, should be as many as possible, but lim- 
ited in size — a maximum cum laude, the highest with praise— beyond 
which no one should go. And why not ? If our universities find it 
wise to fix a maximum prize, and our boys in their games find it 
necessary to place a handicap on the strongest player, to equalize 
conditions and to make the game fairer and more interesting, why 
not, in the game of life, have some kind of bar to the crafty and un- 
scrupulous, to the end that the prizes shall be more fairly divided 
and more widely distributed ? Stockbridge's sympathies went out to 
the weak, and if he had been born in this century I believe he would 
have become, in the best sense of the word, a socialist. He abhorred 
a plutocracy, and believed in ever}' man having a fair chance. 

You all know how useful and infiuential he was in the early years 
of the College. I wonder if you know how many times, when it 
was without friends and without funds to pay current ex- 
penses, he raised the money at the local bank on his own notes, or 
on the College notes endorsed by himself. I remember a bank 
friend of his taking him to task for doing it, saying that if he had to 
pay the notes it would ruin him. Stockbridge's reply was prophetic : 

" Oh, I am not afraid ! Never you worry ! The state of Massachu- 
setts has entered into a contract with the United States government 
to maintain this institution, and the State of Massachusetts will never 
go back on her contract. What is more, some day she will see the 
error of her way, and will come to the rescue of this institution and 
do all that may reasonably be asked of her. I tell you, it is going to 
be a success ! " 

We have lived — and, what is more gratifying, he lived — to see 
that remark come true. Not only did the state honor the paper 
which he endorsed, but it has given thousands upon thousands of 
dollars since then, and will give, as we require it, all that we may 
need for the development of this institution. It stands here to-day 
a monument to Levi Stockbridge as much as to any other man in 
Massachusetts. 



Let us hope that some day there will be erected on the campus 
a statue to his memory, or, better still, a building which shall be 
known as " Stockbridge Hall," for the agricultural department, in 
which shall be placed a tablet, stating in simple terms what he did 
for the College and for the young men who came under his benefi- 
cent influence. The impetus and the stimulus which he gave to our 
lives by his splendid manhood and buoyant, hopeful outlook on life, 
have left their imprint upon us all, and are an inheritance which we 
shall hand on to those who come after us. The bright, cheery boy 
from the Hadley farm, self-taught, lives not only in this institution, 
but in the lives and character of hundreds of students who remember 
him and ever will remember him as " dear old Prof. Stock," whom 
they all loved. 

If I were asked what was Stockbridge's greatest contribution 
to agriculture, I should say that it was not his formulas for crop 
feeding by which he is so widely known ; for, useful as these were, 
they were but stepping stones to a better knowledge of the object 
and use of fertilizers. His greatest contribution to agriculture, as it 
seems to me, was his new conception of the office of fertility in farm 
economy. Up to the time of the publication of the Stockbridge for- 
mulas, the practice had been to manure the soil in order to restore 
lost fertility and to supply deficiencies in the soil, as ascertained by 
a chemical or crop analysis of the soil, Stockbridge saw that this 
method was not a practical solution of the problem, for neither 
chemical nor crop analysis of the soil could be relied upon as a true 
guide to its enrichment. The chemist disclosed too much that was 
misleading and the crop too little that was conclusive. But, what is 
more to the point, Stockbridge saw that we had taken hold of the 
problem at the wrong end. It was not the soil, but the crop, that we 
should first consider. We should study it and its needs, and supply 
it, as far as we were able, with the necessary elements of plant nutri- 
tion by the use of properly balanced manures. In a word, he turned 
from the inert soil, which could not answer, to the living crop, which 
could, and put this question to it : 

•' What shall I supply you in excess of what you may obtain from 
the soil or air by your own habits and conditions of growth to make 
you a perfect and profitable crop?" 



On the other hand the farmer was asking him : 

" What shall I use to produce profitable crops — how much and in 
what form? " 

Starting then from the crop, with the farmer's question ever spur- 
ring him on and with such data as he could find, he worked out his 
well known formulas, which were published broadcast in 1876. And 
let me say here that besides being published in many agricultural 
papers and reports more than half a million pamphlets containing 
them were distributed. 

He did not claim that his formulas were infallible, for he antici- 
pated and announced, what we soon discovered in practice, that they 
would need to be modified, as experience should point the way. 
They served, however, a greater purpose even than Stockbridge 
dreamed at the time — they centered our thought and our study on 
the crop. From that time on we discussed plant food and not soil 
food- — plant feeding instead of soil manuring. " Feed the crop 
rather than the soil," was a frequent expression at this time. 

It is well to observe here that crop formulas were not new. Ville 
and others had published various sets. The Stockbridge formulas, 
however, were unique in this : that they were based not alone on the 
analysis of the crop, but on its power of absorption from all the 
sources of fertility — from soil, air and water. Thus Stockbridge 
boldly prescribed : 

"To produce fifty bushels of shelled corn per acre (without any 
stable manure) and its natural proportion of stover, more than the 
natural yield of the land, apply so many pounds each of nitrogen, 
potash and phosphoric acid. Or to produce a stated quantity of 
tobacco leaf of the desired color and texture, apply a stated quantity 
of plant food elements, preferably in the form of sulphates and 
nitrates." 

-Here then, for the first time, a definite way was prescribed to at- 
tain a deiinite object. It was a startling proposition, and, as might 
be expected, it brought ridicule from many quarters, but Stockbridge 
did not allow that to disturb him. He knew that the commercial 
farmer needed a tangible starting point. He knew that to consider 
the needs of the crop, the living thing, both as to amount and kind 
of plant food, rather than the needs of the soil, an unknown and un- 
knowable quantity, was not only a common sense way of meeting the 
problem of plant nutrition, but a very direct way of helping the farmer 



out of the quagmire of doubt. The formulas might not be accurate ; 
in some cases they might supply excessive amounts of plant food 
elements and apparently be very wasteful, yet he believed that in the 
end it was better economy to apply too much and insure a crop, than 
use too little and lose a crop. Nevertheless, as Professor Stockbridge 
anticipated would be the case, the fertilizers based on his formulas 
were modified from time to time as we gained light, chiefly by the 
reduction of nitrogen and the increase of phosphoric acid, as it was 
found that many crops were able to gather from natural sources, 
through bacterial action or otherwise, some part of the required 
nitrogen, and that an excess of available phosphoric acid would has- 
ten maturity. It was also found that to supply the full complement 
of nitrogen in addition to what the crop would assimilate for itself 
tended in many cases to produce an unbalanced growth ; yet, on the 
other hand, it was found that in some cases, especially where a 
forced growth or a tender leaf was required, an excess of nitrogen 
was desirable. Thus it will be seen that the crop was both the start- 
ing and the objective point. Not only its chemical needs, but its 
habits and conditions of growth, the object for which it was grown, 
and its market qualities, were all factors which influenced the compo- 
sition or modification of the fertilizers ; and the same factors are as 
potent to-day. Since, then, it was the crop that chiefly concerned 
Professor Stockbridge, how natural and sensible was his ques- 
tion : " What shall I supply you to make you a perfect and profita- 
ble crop ? " 

Let us now consider for a moment another phase of the subject, 
namely, the potential fertility of the soil, or " the natural yield," to 
which Professor Stockbridge frequently referred. It has been known 
for a long time that practically all tillable soils are rich in plant food 
elements, and yet many of them are barren, and most of them will 
not produce profitable crops without the aid of manure or fertilizer.* 

* Professor Frederick D. Cliester, of Delaware, states in an able bulletin recently pub- 
lished : 

" An average of the results of 49 analyses of the typical soils of the L'nited States 
showed per acre for the first eight inches of surface 2600 pounds of nitrogen, 4S00 pounds of 
phosphoric acid and 13,400 pounds of potash. The average yield of wheat in the United 
States is 14 bushels per acre. Such a crop will remove 29.7 pounds of nitrogen, 9.5 pounds 
of phosphoric acid and 13.7 pounds of potash. 

" Now, if all the potential nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash could be rendered 
available, there is present in such an average soil, in the first eight inches, enough nitrogen 
to last 90 years, enough phosphoric acid for 500 years, and enough potash for 1000 years. 

"This is what is meant by potential soil fertility, and yet such a soil possessing this 
same high potential fertility may, under certain conditions, be so actually barren of results 
to the farmer as to lead him to believe it absolutely devoid of plant food."' 



In a word, potential fertility represents plant food which is so 
tightly locked up that it is not available for present needs, and be- 
comes available only through the process of decay and disintegra- 
tion, which is too slow to meet the requirements of the commercial 
farmer. Stockbridge realized the situation, but instead of asking 
the soil how much of the potential fertility could be depended upon 
for each crop (a question which will never be satisfactorily an- 
swered), he went to the crop and asked it how much it was necessary 
to supply for a stated yield over and above the natural yield of the 
land. In all cases he found it to be a very small quantity. For the 
corn crop not over 200 pounds of nitrogen, potash and phosphoric 
acid was necessary, which the crop would return fifty fold (at least 
five tons in stalk and grain) — so little to produce so much — and yet 
if this little quantity of 200 pounds was not supplied the crop would 
be a failure. 

It was this little essential balance of available plant food which 
stood between success and failure that concerned Professor Stock- 
bridge, as it concerns every farmer to-day. Although it was small, 
he did not deem it wise to depend upon the potential fertility of the 
soil to supply it, or even any considerable part of it. For the com- 
mercial farmer it was too risky and uncertain. To insure a crop, as 
far as one was able, was a cardinal principle with him ; not to do it 
was in his eyes almost a crime. But he felt that all these things 
would right themselves as we came to know more about farm crops 
and their environment. 

As bearing on the economy of his system of plant feeding, I want 
to quote here one of his apt illustrations. He said in effect : 

" In a sense the farmer is a manufacturer and the soil is his ma- 
chine, into which he puts plant food, and out of which, by the aid of 
Nature and his own efforts, he takes his product at harvest time. If 
the soil machine is a good one, so much the better. If it has a 
balance of crop-producing power to its credit, let us preserve that 
balance for a'n emergency. Let us not draw on it for present needs." 

He had no patience with the so-called single-element doctrine, 
which depends for its success on the potential fertility — no patience 
with the farmer who was trying to find out for himself if he could 
leave out any one of the three leading elements of plant nutrition 
(nitrogen, potash and phosphoric acid), or how little of each he could 
get along with. That was a proper subject for the scientific worker 



14 

to investigate, but until we knew more about it the practical farmer, 
who had his living to make and bills to pay, should not tinker with 
it. To Stockbridge it meant, in the end, improvident farming. At 
best, the farmer had to take great chances, especially with the 
weather — the largest factor in crop raising, over which he had no 
control ; but he should take no chances with the things which he 
could control. Among these were the amount and kind of manure 
which he applied to his crops. Thus, if he hoped for a stated crop 
he should at least fertilize intelligently for that crop. For the man 
who was dependent on his crops any other course was unwise. 
Moreover, any other course would leave the soil machine in a poorer 
condition than he found it. Broadly speaking, to encourage him to 
take out more than he put back was not only bad economy, but bad 
morals, and should be discouraged, for in the end it would lead to 
crop bankruptcy. 

It is needless to say that the farmers appreciated this bold course. 
As Stockbridge put it, they jumped on his wagon before he was 
ready to start. He was indeed their prophet, who led them out of 
the wilderness of speculation into the light of practical methods. 
As might be expected, this new conception of the use of chemical 
manures — or plant food, as he liked to call it — not only revolution- 
ized all our notions of fertilization, but the entire fertilizer business 
as well. It immediately raised the standard of commercial manures 
from ordinary superphosphates, containing no potash, to "complete 
manures," many of them rich in potash. Special fertilizers for 
special crops or classes of crops were brought out by various makers, 
and the business received a new impetus and a new recognition in 
the community. It was put on a sound footing, from which it can 
never be displaced. 

As in stock feeding we chiefly concern ourselves with the study of 
the animal and its needs, so in plant feeding we must make an in- 
telligent study of the needs of the living crop. As we know how to 
feed the cow for milk or beef, so we must know how to feed the plant 
for leaf or seed. Not only must we know the amount of plant food 
to be supplied, based on crop requirements, but the form and asso- 
ciation of the different elements must be considered ; and in the 
study of this problem we must also continue to study the soil, its 
potential fertility, its physical and chemical characteristics, and par- 
ticularly the lower orders of life which it contains, the bacteria and 



15 

other unseen forces. In short, we must continue our study of all 
the sources and forces of fertility, to the end that we may know what 
each contributes to the upbuilding, not necessarily of the soil, but of 
the crop life above the soil. Thus did Stockbridge teach and 
practice. 

As Stevenson made practical the discovery of Watts, as Singer 
improved upon the invention of Howe, so Stockbridge took the 
teachings of Liebig and Johnson, the tables of Wolf, and the experi- 
ments of Goessmann, Atwater and Sturtevant, and applied them to 
practical and useful ends. While the system of plant feeding which 
he employed, or perhaps I should say the method of application as 
prescribed in his formulas, did not appeal to the scientific mind in 
the beginning, it did appeal to the practical farmers, for it met their 
needs as no other method ever before had done. As good practice 
and good science must agree in the end, so I believe the scientific 
world is coming to agree with the practical farmer that the system 
and the method of application for which Stockbridge stood and la- 
bored is as truly scientific as it is thoroughly practical, and to accord 
him a high place among the workers for the advancement of scien- 
tific as well as practical husbandry. 



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